Please Don’t Hire a Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer

Every serious technology company now has an Artificial Intelligence team in place. These companies are investing millions into intelligent systems for situation assessment, prediction analysis, learning-based recognition systems, conversational interfaces, and recommendation engines. Companies such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon aren’t just employing AI, but have made it a central part of their core intellectual property.

As the market has matured, AI is beginning to move into enterprises that will use it but not develop it on their own. They see intelligent systems as solutions for sales, logistics, manufacturing, and business intelligence challenges. They hope AI can improve productivity, automate existing process, provide predictive analysis, and extract meaning from massive data sets. For them, AI is a competitive advantage, but not part of their core product. For these companies, investment in AI may help solve real business problems but will not become part of customer facing products. Pepsi, Wal-Mart and McDonalds might be interested in AI to help with marketing, logistics or even flipping burgers but that doesn’t mean that we should expect to see intelligent sodas, snow shovels, or Big Macs showing up anytime soon.

As with earlier technologies, we are now hearing advice about “AI strategies” and how companies should hire Chief AI Officers. In much the same way that the rise of Big Data led to the Data Scientist craze, the argument is that every organization now needs to hire a C-Level officer who will drive the company’s AI strategy.

I am here to ask you not to do this. Really, don’t do this.

It’s not that I doubt AI’s usefulness. I have spent my entire professional life working in the field. Far from being a skeptic, I am a rabid true believer.

However, I also believe that the effective deployment of AI in the enterprise requires a focus on achieving business goals. Rushing towards an “AI strategy” and hiring someone with technical skills in AI to lead the charge might seem in tune with the current trends, but it ignores the reality that innovation initiatives only succeed when there is a solid understanding of actual business problems and goals. For AI to work in the enterprise, the goals of the enterprise must be the driving force.